Photos of the Day: Politicians Pretending to Work on the Trail

By David A. Graham

Running for office isn't just kissing babies and shaking hands. There's also the time-honored ritual of play-acting that you're blue collar.

Campaigning for president means surrendering to a certain set of indignities. The press and opposition researchers will rototill your past to find unflattering information, you'll spend hours supplicating donors for money while bouncing around rural states on a bus, and you'll probably have to eat some fried butter. One of the most entertaining rituals, however, is seeing the candidates -- who are by and large well-educated Americans making six figures per year -- attempt to ingratiate themselves with the working-class by taking turns pretending to do blue-collar work.

Some candidates are able to do this more convincingly than others. And some can actually lay claim to a real working-class background. In the 2012 field, for example, Tim Pawlenty's father was a delivery-truck driver, and Herman Cain helped to put himself through college operating a jackhammer on construction sites. Interestingly, pictures of those two doing manual labor on the trail are tough to find.